statement: “The Harris-Biden Administration has been found to have falsified employment statistics.”
The federal agency that counts the number of people in the workforce delivered an unwelcome gift to Democrats during the week of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago: it revised down last year’s job gains by 818,000.
Job gains under the administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been a bright spot for the economy, even as inflation remains stubbornly high.
Former President Donald Trump used the topic to attack Democratic presidential candidate Harris on the economy at an event in Cochise County, Arizona on August 22.
“I want to address the fake jobs numbers that the Harris-Biden Administration has been reporting for the last year. They falsely claimed they created 818,000 jobs,” Trump said.
On August 21, President Trump went further in a Truth Social post, accusing the administration of misconduct.
“Big Scandal! The Harris-Biden Administration has been found to have rigged jobs statistics to hide the true extent of the economic devastation it has inflicted on America. New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the Administration inflated the numbers by adding 818,000 jobs that don’t exist and never did.”
Last week, a recalculated report of jobs for last year showed 818,000 fewer jobs than originally recorded, meaning economy-wide employment fell by half a percentage point.
But economists across ideologies rejected Trump’s assertion that the administration was falsifying the books. Rather, the process is an annual effort to fine-tune initial data that officials acknowledge is imperfect.
“There is no basis for Trump’s claims,” said Douglas Holtz Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum. “This is a standard, periodic revision of the employment report.”
What happened last week?
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday released its annual “benchmark” adjustments to state-by-state unemployment insurance data, which is considered more accurate than the employer-based data the bureau uses to compile its closely watched monthly employment reports.
Using more accurate unemployment insurance data, the bureau found that payrolls in March were 818,000 lower than initially announced. That was the biggest downward revision of payrolls in 15 years and raised concerns among economists that the economy may be weakening. That could strengthen the case for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates when it meets in September.
When we reached out to the Republican National Committee, spokesperson Anna Kelly said the Biden-Harris administration is “shifting the blame for an economic crisis that it created.”
But the committee did not provide any evidence to support Trump’s claim that the administration “was found to have rigged employment statistics.”
This recalculation was not a ploy.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is staffed with trained civil servants and has never faced credible accusations of political bias. The procedures it uses for rebalancing are clearly defined and have been in use for many years.
This isn’t a “conspiracy,” said Dean Baker, co-founder of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. “This is all a completely standard process that happens every year.”
A similar revision released in 2019 under President Trump “showed significant reductions,” said Tara Sinclair, an economist at George Washington University and former deputy assistant secretary for macroeconomics in the Treasury Department’s Office of Economic Policy.
“Economists want complete information, which takes time and is released on a regularly planned schedule,” Sinclair said.
The recently announced adjustments are provisional and may be revised again, either upwards or downwards, before becoming official in February.
PolitiFact’s ruling
“It’s been discovered that the Harris-Biden administration has been manipulating employment statistics,” Trump said.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ regular revisions to its jobs numbers would no doubt undermine Harris’ economic rhetoric, but there is no evidence that the administration has tampered with those numbers: Public officials have been collating the data in the same way on the same schedule for years.
Economists of all ideologies said they saw no evidence of political interference in the data.
Trump’s claim is false and absurd. We rate it “Pants on Fire.”
Our Sources
- Donald Trump, Truth Social, August 21, 2024
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “CES Interim Benchmark Release,” August 21, 2024.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “2019 CES Interim Benchmarks Revised Edition,” accessed August 21, 2024.
- Dean Baker, “A Complex Story: What the Employment Data Revision Means,” August 21, 2024
- Email interview with Douglas Holtz Eakin, president of American Action Forum, August 22, 2024
- Email interview with George Washington University economist Tara Sinclair, August 22, 2024
- Email interview with Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, August 22, 2024
- Email interview with Gary Burtress, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, August 22, 2024
- Email interview with Anna Kelly, spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, August 22, 2024
